Comments on: Blogging: The Next Generation

By: Club Troppo » Blog Software: Who Cares?

Club Troppo » Blog Software: Who Cares? — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:51:31 +0000

[...] my last entry on this topic, I outlined at a very high level that I felt the time had come for a fourth generation of social software. I promised at the time [...]

By: Club Troppo » Friday’s Missing Link on Saturday

Club Troppo » Friday’s Missing Link on Saturday — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:09:25 +0000

[...] Chester continues a sporadic series on discovering the next generation of blogging and Nicholas Gruen counters that with some thoughts on the next generation of Big [...]

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:18:11 +0000

It has a steep learning curve, but the results can be well worth the effort.

One thing I was going to go over in the next piece was that “steep learning curve” dramatically reduces uptake. Wordpress went a long way boasting that installation takes 5 minutes.

I do recognise however that Drupal is a very mature platform, and maturity breeds power.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:14:09 +0000

Yes, I saw that bit recently. Funnily enough the Hula project he mentions withered on the vine.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:07:29 +0000

jwz says ‘…narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?’

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

I think that the essay might tie more into more with your next piece, about the stakeholders, but I was reminded of the article – coincidently – and I thought I better post it before I forgot about it again.

By: Stephen Bounds

Stephen Bounds — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:04:29 +0000

Jacques, If scalability and the ability to add features are important, you should really look at Drupal. Very efficient and scalable, it's also built using a very clean and practical module system. You can turn it into anything from a basic blog to a full newspaper-style publishing system. It has a steep learning curve, but the results can be well worth the effort. (And the learning curve has been mitigated a bit by a proper setup page in Drupal 5.x.)

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:51:11 +0000

amph;

The next in the series will be talking about stakeholders. I hate that word too, but so far nobody’s come up with a better one for “set of people identifiably in different groups with different wishes”.

When that happens, I hope you’ll recognise yourself in one or two of those categories.

By: amphibious

amphibious — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:49:04 +0000

I’m with TonyT – I read the post, all of the comments, recognised all the words as english (kinda, sorta) but have how NO idea what any of it meant.

By: cam

cam — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:40:12 +0000

From here:

I [Bill de hora] am moving off Movable Type. In favor of my own codebase. I've decided weblogs are to this decade as editors were to the 1970s. You have to write your own. It's a pretty thin rationale - the 1970s more or less sucked as I recall.

By: Niall

Niall — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:17:34 +0000

What’s wrong with Dianna Troi? Okay, she can’t drive, but oh my, that de collage.

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:57:16 +0000

thanks jacques that Clay Shirky essay is good. I’m an old Tavistock/ Bion Group leader myself.I’ll read it again. Then try to get back. S/he hits on what I have been whinging about – how to get the best out or irc, usenet, email, ftp, http, web pages, pnp, IM, blogs and roll it together somehow.

I just love the music cats sending 180 gig HDs to each other. My kind of group.

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:44:42 +0000

Threaded commenting. Plonking tools for commenters.

By: Tony T.

Tony T. — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:29:23 +0000

On topic? Apart from the TV references, I have no idea what your post is about.

Except for “stakeholders”. Thanks to James Sutherland at CrickAussie, I know what that means.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:07:35 +0000

This thread could very easily fly off into jokes about TOS, TNG, Battlestar Galactica and the vastly-superior-to-all-the-aforementioned Firefly. But I’d like to keep it on topic, please.

By: Tony T.

Tony T. — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:05:03 +0000

Out: The Next Generation Blogging.

In: Battlestar Blogging.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:16:52 +0000

I suppose I don’t think the plugin systems are very good either. The most interesting plugin approach is Eclipse: almost everything is a plugin. There’s a small plugin runtime, then everything else is a series of layered plugins.

In Wordpress and others, plugins tend to be almost an afterthought. Eclipse may be painfully over-designed but at least every plugin has certain fundamental properties.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine, for example. Many plugins inject CSS directives, but there’s no standard way to do it. I spend a lot of time fiddling with plugin code because of that.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:02:33 +0000

This essay is a good example of what I need more of.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:02:22 +0000

As for your original question, I am not sure we need to write a new generation. Some of the things you mentioned – comment threading, better moderation – could be done with the plugin systems of existing engines. Others like killfiles are really a client thing unless accounts become fashionable, and the blog community has pretty resistant to accounts so far. On the other hand, I don’t see a blog equivalent of a newsreader – so read and write rather than just read like current feedreaders – happening any time soon; how much change would you need to do to MetaWeblog and Blogger APIs to allow comments as well as post maintenance?

That *would* be the feature I would like to see, though. An API so rich that I wouldn’t even need to go to the website, I could interact entirely through a rich client.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:51:29 +0000

tins? I sound like a kiwi. I meant tons.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:51:24 +0000

My understanding is that both the inbuilt cache for intermediate objects, and the WP-Cache of pages, use a filesystem cache. You can plugin different backends for the internal cache, which I did do on our VPS. It placed intermediate objects into APC, which was useful as it caused a lot of files (like images) to be served from RAM.

Still, there is no real end-to-end notion or approach to caching. It works but it requires lots of fiddling.

On the VPS, Troppo was cached at three levels: MySQL queries, the APC cache and WP-Cache. It was still slow.

By: gilmae

gilmae — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:47:52 +0000

Question – does Wordpress cache like MT does – or did, I dunno how 4th Edition works – by creating a tins of static files, or is the caching pushed onto the httpd level?

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:15:03 +0000

Done!

By: Amanda

Amanda — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:12:16 +0000

I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t involve Deanna Troi.